I’ve struggled over the years to find a good, reliable solution for maintaining secure backups of my files. As my much of my real-world possessions become digital versions of themselves I’ve grown increasingly paranoid about losing them.

I’ve been averaging about 1 lost hard drive per year for the last 4 years. When a begins hard drive to fail I typically have to scramble to clear space somewhere else, or start digging through my archives in hopes that I actually did back up everything to one of the other corners of another hard drive. I’ve tried building dedicated server machines, I’ve tried a multiple hard drive configuration, but it is all too complicated.

Running parallel to all of this has been my growing concern for my carbon footprint. Sure, it sounds wacky. Why should I be concerned? I’m just some guy in MN. But I figure becoming more green isn’t a choice, but a lifestyle change. If we don’t start to become aware of our ecological impact now then we won’t be able to solve the problem later. We recently downsized from the truck to the Mazda, all new light bulbs are compact fluorescent (most that are needing to be replaced were already halogens). This article got me thinking about the waste of power I was spending keeping so many machines on during the day.

So to cut out one whole computer from the Broken Complex I decided to outsource my backup. I chose to use Mozy, for mostly the unlimited backup space and zero transfer charges. For 5 bucks a month I can backup any data on my machine. Mozy runs in the background constantly checking for new files. Once a night any new files are uploaded to Mozy. So far I’ve been quite satisfied with the service. Mozy makes it clear that they are not an offsite hard drive facility, Mozy is a backup solution, that’s it. It doesn’t work well as a file dumping grounds. It’s job is to simply ensure that the files selected on the local machine are successfully backed up to Mozy’s servers. There are other services that tackle both backup and remote storage, but they were cost prohibited to the amount I need to store.

The initial backup of 80 gigs of pictures and music took 6 weeks due to Comcast’s upload limit of 384kbps. It  finally completed the other day and we reclaimed a speedy network connection again. After the upload completed I was able to shut off a computer that had been running for 3 years. The computer room has become quite quiet.